​Out of Colditz: My Father the POW and the Nazi Who Controlled His Fate, reviewed by David Vaiani

Sprawled on the ground, deep behind enemy lines, his stomach riddled with bullets, George Lascelles feared mainly that he would be on a diet of rice pudding for the rest of his life. Out of Colditz, the son’s tender, generous and unaffected account of his father’s time at the notorious Second World War prisoner-of-war camp is filled with such amusing anecdotes, and makes for a very enjoyable read.

George Lascelles (1923-2011), first cousin of the late Elizabeth II, later became the 7th Earl of Harewood. His son David Lascelles is now the 8th Earl.

As part of his research, David Lascelles travelled to Germany to retrace his father’s journey to Colditz. While he found that most Germans see it as just another castle in Upper Saxony, to the British Colditz has become ‘part of the national legend’. Nor has the vast bibliography devoted to this subject – more than 100 books in the English-speaking world alone – diminished the public’s appetite.

But to George Lascelles, Colditz was entirely uncharted territory. As George V’s grandson and thus one of the so-called Prominente prisoners at Colditz, the future 7th Earl of Harewood was sixth in line to the throne at birth. Understandably, he was discreet about this during his captivity, telling a German padre that he had ‘a relative who lives near Victoria Station’.

His first impression of the ‘grim and unprepossessing’ castle was briefly overcome when he found himself sharing a cell with Dawyck Haig, the son of Douglas Haig, and King George’s godson.

The last time the two men had met was in 1937, when both had been pageboys at George VI’s coronation. Aside from that momentary ray of hope, conditions at Colditz were unremittingly bleak. The brutal Saxon winters saw temperatures fall to –15°, and although Lascelles had a stove, the castle was hardly designed for warmth. Food rations amounted to a meagre 1,100 calories per day, and led Lascelles to drop 20 pounds in three months. His sole consolation was to read Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis.

As the days turned into weeks and months, a mixture of boredom and fear predominated among the inmates. When they were not taking bets on the end of the war, or discussing whether Herbert Sutcliffe or Jack Hobbs was the superior batsman, a rare treat consisted in their being allowed to explore – under armed supervision – the countryside around Colditz. In a typically grim attempt at humour, the German soldiers joked that the barren surroundings were ‘just like your Cotswolds’.

Towards the end, despite ‘the sound of the Allied guns’ providing them with a ‘thrilling premonition of freedom’, they feared being kept as potential hostages after the war. Worst of all, they were tormented by the thought of ending up at Hitler’s infamous mountain hideaway as part of some macabre last stand.

The author, a distinguished film and television producer, is a natural story-teller. The two main protagonists – Lascelles senior and Gottlob Berger, the SS head of the POW camps – do not actually meet until about halfway through the book, which only adds to the sense of drama.

By the time their worlds collide, Berger has decided to ignore Hitler’s order to shoot the captives. Instead, he offers a ‘special escort’ to take them to the American front line. Lascelles and his friends are stunned – but there were also flashes of the absurd. At a farewell party that evening, they arrive in a room ‘decked out like a baronial dining hall’, where they find the mercurial Berger wearing a white mess jacket that makes him look ‘like an American businessman on vacation in Palm Springs’.

What motivated Berger? With the war almost over, he believed that executing the captives would be both futile and criminal. More cynically, he probably hoped that his gesture of clemency would count in his favour after the war. Either way, in the second half of the book the author offers a thoughtful reflection on how the saga affected both the Lascelles and the Berger families.

As the typical product of his time and class, George Lascelles rarely spoke of his time at Colditz, but it is telling that his Lords maiden speech – against the death penalty – was at least in part motivated by his experiences as a POW.

In Berger’s eulogy, meanwhile, it was said that his life had ‘belonged to Germany and the Waffen-SS until his final breath’. Nor did he ever, according to his son, who had endured a ‘difficult’ relationship with his father, feel any sense of remorse for the Nazis’ crimes.

The one blemish in an otherwise fine work is the author’s jarring parallel between Nazi Germany and colonial Britain. A reference to his family’s fortune being tied up with West Indian sugar plantations leads him to argue that whereas ‘Germany has tried very hard to face its history, Britain seems curiously reluctant to face its past at all.’

There really is no moral equivalence, not least as Britain was far from alone in the slave trade, and also because, unlike the Nazis, the British were not engaged in the systematic extermination of an entire race.

It is a pity, because the story is an excellent one and does not require any embellishment to improve it.

David Vaiani is author of King and Country: The 1933 Student Debate That Shook the World